Warm tributes paid to Věra Čáslavská at National Theatre memorial

Final farewells were paid to the great gymnast Věra Čáslavská at
Prague’s National Theatre on Monday. Athletes from across the
generations, ministers and other notable figures from Czech public life
expressed their respect for the nation’s most successful Olympian, who
passed away two weeks ago at the age of 74.

Photo: CTK
Following a private funeral service last week, a public, rather celebratory
memorial was held for Věra Čáslavská at a packed National Theatre on
Monday morning.

Czech sports stars of past and present rubbed shoulders with cabinet
members and well-known faces from the arts sphere.

Věra Čáslavská held the national record for Olympic gold medals with
seven, three from Tokyo in 1964 and four from Mexico in 1968.

Among those who paid tribute to her from the stage of the National Theatre
were a number of other, in the main more recent, Czech Olympic champions.

One of them, Barbora Špotáková, recalled her first encounter with the
legendary gymnast at an awards ceremony, a year after Špotáková’s
triumph in Beijing in 2008.

Věra Čáslavská, photo: Ron Kroon / Anefo, CC 3.0“Věra – a hurricane – sidled up to me and said, Hi, I’m Věra and
we’re going to address one another informally. At first I just wasn’t
able to – such was my enormous admiration for her. But later her warmth,
her optimism and her sense of humour disarmed me and I got used to it.”

Čáslavská had protested against the Soviet-led invasion of 1968, a move
which came at some personal cost in communist Czechoslovakia.

After 1989 she returned to public life, among other activities serving as
an adviser to President Vacláv Havel.

Havel’s one-time press spokesman Michael Žantovský told the crowd that
Čáslavská had rather stood out among the former dissidents at Prague
Castle in the early 1990s.

“We called her ‘the arrow’ because she went into everything without
hesitation and headfirst. Her vocabulary didn’t include the words
‘impossible’ or ‘late’… At several of the presidential team’s
workshops focused on the issues of the day at Lány, she forced us to do
warm-up exercises in the morning, without any regard for protesting
rheumatic joints or smokers’ lungs.”

On a more serious note, Czech Olympic Committee chief Jiří Kejval said
Věra Čáslavská didn’t just have time for the top, headline-grabbing
athletes of today.

Jiří Kejval, photo: CTK“She was also interested in little-known sportspeople. She was
interested in everything that was going on and never turned down an
invitation to a get-together. Even when her health was bad towards the end,
she attended hundreds a year… She fought for increased funding for sport.
She always fought for things that didn’t concern her directly but which
concerned our society.”

The final speaker was the great gymnast’s friend, the documentary maker
Olga Sommerová.

“Beautiful, courageous, a fighter, Věra Čáslavská was one of the
bravest women of the 20th century. She was a genuine national hero who
never bowed down to anybody.”